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“... She stirs up ghosts and has no hand in laying them to rest. The centre wall of samplers deploys white figures cut from black paper: the subjects are all absences. This frieze, The Sovereign Citizens’ Sesquicentennial Civil War Celebration, brings the story from the plantation into the present, even though the cast of characters look unchangingly ...”

“... immigrants won’t ‘integrate’. This shameful state of affairs was legitimised in 2005 by Tony Blair in the White Paper Controlling Our Borders: Making Migration Work for Britain: ‘Tolerance [is] under threat from those … abusing our hospitality.’ Faced with a moral panic about alien hordes pouring into ...”

“... daughter cannot enter paradise until the tally of clothes is complete. The teller of this story, Tony McIlhenny, says the father has created ‘the worst punishment of all’ for his child, ‘not being able to let it die properly, getting it caught between this world and the next’. ‘The air of Donegal, of all Ireland, was full of such people, he had ...”

“... ever more intimate political relationships at the centre of power, even compared to the days when Tony Blair was ruling the country with the aid of his former pupil master and his former flatmate (and perhaps his wife as well). Of course, politics has always been about personal connections and private vendettas, but the current narrowing of the political ...”

“... covering of flesh was so transmuted with ecstasy that early passion became a heavenly embrace of white fiery flame. There are joys so complete, so all perfect, that one should not survive them. Ah why did not my burning soul find exit that night, and fly, like Blake’s angel, through the clouds of our earth to another sphere? These alarming words helped to ...”

“... latest polls show the Coloured vote breaking at least 3:1 in favour of the DA, a party led by a white, Helen Zille. (The DA is Helen Suzman’s old party.) This is remarkable. In Cape Town both mayoral candidates, the DA’s Patricia de Lille and the ANC’s Tony Ehrenreich, are Coloured. Ehrenreich, a Marxist and trade ...”

“... waving their neofascist banners, the letters FN emblazoned in black italic script on a red and white background. For about half a second I felt like Isherwood in Berlin in the early 1930s. Then I reminded myself that the most right-wing of the 16 parties competing for my neighbours’ votes at the beginning of next week has no chance of coming to power. In ...”

“... off by the Ukip MEP Godfrey Bloom for not cleaning behind the fridge), and not all of us were white: demographically unpromising candidates for membership in a party which is anyway tiny – an order of magnitude smaller than Labour or the Tories, its membership amounts to 0.06 per cent of the electorate. The amateur Ukip enthusiast may have meant only ...”

“... pages of the Financial Times, the New York Times and the Economist. They depict the tyro in the White House as an unprecedented calamity, more so evidently than the economic inequality, deadlocked government, subprime debt, offshored jobs, unrestrained corporate power and compromised legislature that made Trump seem a credible candidate to millions of ...”

“... than anything painters commonly manage comes through. Sir John Herschel’s stubbly chin and wild white hair as they emerge from draped velvet in Julia Margaret Cameron’s photograph do not conform to the painterly canon of images of great men. But many early art photographs do recall paintings. Country people in Peter Henry Emerson’s pictures from the ...”

“... the Fontana, the emulsion-on-hardboard multi-head portraits on which a generation of uncatalogued white moulds are breeding. The manifestos have been composed. It’s the time of the Art Wars (1990-93), and Tony Lowes, Philosopher, asserts that ‘to save the starving we must give up art.’ Wittgenstein, apparently, was of ...”

“... If​ his English teacher hadn’t been so snootily discouraging, it’s unlikely that Tony Harrison would have gone on to write as much as he has: by my calculation, 13 plays, 11 films and twenty or more poetry collections and pamphlets, not to mention the essays and addresses assembled in Edith Hall’s edition of his selected prose ...”

“... itself as the alternative to years of ‘Tory sleaze’. We have been here before. In 1998 Tony Blair pledged that his government would be ‘purer than pure’, after the former Labour adviser Derek Draper was caught boasting to the undercover journalist Greg Palast about selling his Downing Street connections to business clients. But little has ...”

“... trousers and shirts with the two top buttons undone, collar points two feet apart, of tanned white skin, gold, nice teeth, the smell of tobacco and aftershave and deodorant, of men outwardly confident, hungry, vain, bullying, concupiscent and covetous, but also charming, garrulous, fascinating, prone to infatuations with strangers and their ...”

“... Poetry written in dialect seems to be undergoing a resurgence. Tony Harrison has made extensive use of Northern idioms. Tom Paulin has been busy raiding Ulster (and, I suspect, Scottish) dictionaries. Craig Raine has produced a manifesto, ‘Babylonish Dialects’, on dialect’s behalf. And several of the books under review here – by Scots, Welshmen and British West Indians – cannot be read without the glossaries which they thoughtfully provide ...”